Hong Kong Public Concerned About Sinovac Vaccine Safety

The Hong Kong government has started COVID-19 vaccination for priority groups including people over 60 years old on Feb. 26, 2021. The picture shows two local officials being vaccinated with Chinese-made Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine. (Song Bilong/The Epoch Times)

The Hong Kong government began vaccinating the public with the Chinese domestically-manufactured Sinovac vaccine for free on Feb. 26, and less than three weeks later there have been seven deaths.

As of March 15, a cumulative total of 166,000 Hong Kong people had received the China-made Sinovac vaccine, also known as the “CoronaVac vaccine.”

China, which has been giving vaccines produced domestically since last year and at a much larger scale than Hong Kong, has so far released little data on adverse reactions, raising questions about a lack of transparency and the safety of the Chinese vaccines.

Li Bin, deputy director of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) National Health Commission, said that as of March 14, 64.98 million people had been vaccinated in China, according to a report by the CCP’s overseas mouthpiece, China Daily. However, no specific answers were given regarding issues brought about by the vaccination, such as the immunization status of the vaccinated population, whether there were secondary infections, and what side effects and mortality rates were.

The communist regime has been pushing a ”vaccine diplomacy“ for several months.

China made a recent offer to provide vaccines to Olympic athletes. The vaccine offer to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) came amid international calls to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics in light of the regime’s genocidal campaign against Uyghurs and other minorities in China’s Xinjiang region.

On March 11, IOC President Thomas Bach said the organization had agreed to purchase China’s COVID-19 vaccine to administer to willing participants at the Tokyo Olympics this summer and the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.

Japan’s Olympic Minister Tamayo Marukawa responded quickly and said on March 12 that Japanese athletes would not take the China-made vaccines, which have not been approved by international standards.

According to a Sydney Morning Herald report on March 13, The Australian Olympic Committee Chief Executive Officer Matt Carroll said that “the Chinese vaccine would not be on the table.” He added, “the federal government has expressed full confidence that our athletes will be vaccinated before arriving in Tokyo.”

On the same day, when asked if he would consider using the mainland vaccine, Taiwanese Health Minister Chen Shih-chung told the media that his government included Taiwanese Olympic athletes in the priority list and that they would be inoculated in Taiwan with the AstraZeneca vaccine before they leave for Japan.

When asked if he would consider using the China-made vaccine, Chen replied that if there is more scientific evidence to prove the safety and efficacy of the Chinese vaccine, Taiwan would not rule it out.

Vaccines May Cause a Cardiovascular Inflammatory Response

The Dean of Public Health Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), Leung Gabriel Matthew, when asked on March 13 about the adverse reactions after vaccination, said that the vaccine itself may cause an inflammatory response in people with cardiovascular disease. Once the blood vessels become inflamed, it could induce “acute thrombosis.”

He said that if an acute embolism occurs immediately in the heart, it is a “heart disease,” but if it occurs in the brain, it is a “brain stroke,” which can be fatal in serious cases. He believes that at this stage, he does not dare to categorically judge whether the deaths are indirectly or directly related to the vaccine.

Hong Kong Chinese medicine doctor Cheung Wai Lit also said in an interview with the Hong Kong edition of The Epoch Times that some of his patients who had been injected with the Sinovac vaccine experienced irregular heartbeats, a rise in body temperature, and a rise in blood pressure as if they had been drinking alcohol or taking stimulants. He believes that this is definitely not a “coincidence.”

Cheung called on Hong Kong people to look at this issue with wisdom. So-called experts are often in a collaborative role with the government. “Experts sometimes need to wait for [CCP] instructions, otherwise they can not speak.”

Hong Kong Government Criticized for Conducting Experiment to Curry Favor With the CCP

Though there have been a series of deaths and abnormal cases after vaccination, the Hong Kong government did not stop the vaccination program. On the contrary, it announced on March 15 the expansion of the vaccination priority groups to include people over 30, domestic helpers, and students 16 or above studying outside Hong Kong “as part of the Government’s efforts to expand the scope of the priority groups to allow more people to get vaccinated as soon as possible,” according to the Hong Kong government’s website.

In an interview with the Hong Kong edition of The Epoch Times, 80-year-old Kwok Cheuk Kin, a Hong Kong citizen, said that the local government, to curry favor with the CCP, administers the vaccination via executive order. He said that he himself would never take the China-made vaccine.

According to a report released by the Hong Kong Food and Health Bureau on March 12 (pdf), from the start of the Vaccination Program to March 7, 69 of the 71 cases of adverse events following immunization were related to the Sinovac vaccine.

Xiaoxu Lin, an expert in microbiology and immunology, former microbiologist in the U.S. Army, and lab director at the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Research Institute, told The Epoch Times in an interview that the number of people who died after receiving the vaccine or had serious adverse reactions “must be strictly tracked and then the data released to the public, but the Chinese government basically still adopts a cover-up attitude.”

Eva Fu and Alex Wu contributed to this report.